Linux Hacks

628 Articles

Linux Fu: The Local Phonebook

July 8, 2026 by 30 Comments

I’ll admit it: I miss the simplicity of /etc/hosts. There was something elegant about it. You wanted laserprinter to mean 192.168.1.40, so you opened a text file and wrote:

192.168.1.40 laserprinter

Done. No cloud account, no discovery daemon, no dashboard with material-themed icons. Just a name and an address. The trouble, of course, is that /etc/hosts is only simple when you have one machine. The moment you have a desktop, a laptop, a Raspberry Pi, a NAS, a test box, and a phone or two, every little network change becomes a tiny distributed-database problem. Which copy of /etc/hosts is authoritative? Did you update the laptop? What about the machine you only boot once a month?

One Solution

Modern LANs solved this with mDNS, using Avahi on Linux. It resolves addresses that end in .local. Instead of asking a central DNS server “who is thing.local?”, a machine sends a multicast query on the local network: “who has thing.local?” The device that owns the name answers. This is why your Linux box named spock and usually be reached as spock.local on your LAN.

There are limits. mDNS is link-local; it is meant for the local LAN, not the whole Internet and shouldn’t route across subnets. Each device is supposed to publish its own name. That works fine when the device cooperates. But what about devices that do not publish mDNS? Or little embedded things that barely even have an IP address?

That is where I wanted the best of both worlds: keep a small authoritative /etc/hosts file on one Linux box, but publish selected entries onto the LAN using mDNS.

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The Atari Jaguar Runs Linux

July 7, 2026 by 2 Comments

Among the many forgotten might-have-beens of the games console world, the Atari Jaguar occupies a special place. It was the final gasp of Atari Corporation, the Jack Tramiel-era incarnation of the famous pioneering game console brand that brought us the ST line of computers, and like Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy character from On the Waterfront, it coulda been a contender. But the early ’90s games business wasn’t kind to the console from Sunnyvale, and it was squeezed from behind by the SNES and Genesis/MegaDrive, and in front from the PlayStation. Thirty years later then, can it run Linux? [Cakehonolulu] is here to show us how.

With only 2 megabytes of RAM and space for 8 megabytes of ROM, this is hardly a powerhouse. But its 16-bit 68000 processor is a supported Linux architecture, albeit with the -nommu flag on compilation. The “Jerry” DSP chip has the required serial port and timer to boot a first Linux kernel, and after a bit of hackery to make it jump to the ROM location, something boots. There’s no init process until the flat executable file for a -nommu kernel is navigated, but with that past a BusyBox userspace and a graphics driver for the “Tom” graphics chip gives it a chunky on-screen console. The code can be found in a GitHub repository, for the curious.

It seems to be the moment for 68k consoles to receive the Linux treatment, as it’s only a few weeks since we saw it on a MegaDrive. Other ’90s consoles aren’t far behind though, with the Nintendo 64 falling to the penguin a few years ago. Meanwhile, the Dreamcast had Linux running decades ago.

Jaguar image: Evan-Amos, Public domain.

Homelab Gets Linksys Themed Aesthetic

July 5, 2026 by 20 Comments

If you’re building a homelab rig, you could just use off-the-shelf hardware in standard cases and slap it all in a rack like the normies do. Or, you could follow the example of [Justin Garrison] and build a more oddball setup.

This particular homelab is, at its heart, built from familiar components. There are two Raspberry Pi 5s, two Raspberry Pi 4s, a GMKtec NucBox M6 Mini with an ASUS GeForce RT 2060 GPU, a LattePanda IOTA, an NVidia DGX Spark, and an HP Z4 G4 mini PC. These machines are all laced together with a TP-Link LS108GB PoE switch. [Justin] has the mini PC running the control plane components, with the rig as a whole running Talos and Kubernetes workloads. What makes this build particularly appealing, though, is the aesthetics of the rig. [Justin] documents how he hacked this hardware to fit into a bunch of old Linksys router cases, which provides a pleasant early 2000s look to the build. This included a bit of hackery to get status LEDs flickering as they should be. [Justin] also took the time to make the power buttons accessible.

If you want to stunt on your friends with a rad homelab, you either have to go for maximum power, or maximum style. This build would be the latter. Video after the break.

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Using Flatpak To Run A 1996 Version Of The GIMP On Modern Linux

July 4, 2026 by 4 Comments

Although there’s probably no good reason to want to run image editing software from 1996 other than for nostalgia’s sake, if you ever wanted to run the GIMP version 0.54 from back when Windows 98 was still called Windows 97, you can do so now from the comfort of a modern-day Linux desktop. What enables this is a Flatpak version of a beta release, assembled by [balooii] for everyone’s enjoyment.

It wasn’t a simple matter of compiling the old software’s code and packaging it up, with the repository for the project containing a series of patches that were required to make this possible. Also of note is that this is the first version of GIMP with full surviving source code. Back then, GIMP used the Motif widget toolkit. Later on, it switched to the GIMP Toolkit (GTK).

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It’s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive

June 29, 2026 by 14 Comments

If you were in the market for a games console in 1990, the chances are that the object of your desire was either a Super Nintendo with its 16-bit 6502 derivative, or the Sega Megadrive, sold as the Genesis in North America, with its Motorola 68000. Both machines featured impressive graphics and sound for their time, but they remain firmly in the 16-bit era. Which makes it a surprise to see LinuxMD. It’s Linux, for the Sega Megadrive, with the latest mainline kernel.

The Motorola 68000 series of chips was the first porting target for Linux, and is still maintained in 2026. This build runs from an SD card  in a modern Megadrive storage peripheral, and is reported to run on the original hardware. The lowly 68000 in the Sega doesn’t have a memory management unit required for the full Linux experience, so what’s really running here is a kernel compiled with the -nommu option. That in itself is a feat, on this architecture. On it you get smolutils, a cut down coreutils, and that seems to be it.

We like this project, for pushing both console and kernel to the limit, even though we see that maybe it’s not the most practical Linux machine. Meanwhile though, this isn’t the only UNIX-like OS for this console.

Image: Evan-Amos, Public domain.

Make That Smart TV Into A Computer

June 25, 2026 by 23 Comments

The smart TV is a fixture in most houses, variously an entertainment portal, corporate data gathering tool, or sometimes an outright spy. It’s a nice monitor with a computer built in, so can that computer be released to do something else? It’s a question [Xen’on] is answering, on an Android-based TV.

The guide is not too different from many others relating to Android phones, with a few quirks. An Android Debug Bridge (ADB) connection is established, root access is gained using Shizuku, and then it’s a case of installing a more conventional Linux front end with the Openbox window manager through Termux. There are some TV-specific things to do with handling power cycles, but the TV is now a usable Linux box.

It’s always good to see someone retrieve the Linux underneath a locked-down device, but the system spec tells the real story. By the looks of things this TV is a few years old as it had an Android version that’s a bit long in the tooth, and thus it also packs an aged version 4.x kernel. Couple that with a more seat-of-your-pants experience compared to a regular distro where many of the annoyances are taken care of, this isn’t an easy route to a trouble free desktop. Instead it has a lot of potential for making the TV what it was intend to be, an entertainment device. Merely one that gives much more software freedom.

Meanwhile, this isn’t the first Termux guide we’ve seen.

Linux Fu: Upcycling An Old Router

June 23, 2026 by 28 Comments

You’re wandering through a thrift store and spot an old router for ten bucks. Worthless, right? But in this case, it was a Google OnHub, which, at the time, was pretty premium and still isn’t anything to sneeze at. Of course, Google abandoned it long ago, and it runs Chrome, so pass, right? Of course I didn’t. In fact, I bought two for less than $20. The question is always the same: what do you do with it?

OpenWrt will run on the device. That’s a good start, but merely replacing the firmware isn’t much of a project. The more interesting question is whether the hardware can still do something useful. I had a specific need: connect a wired workstation to a reasonably distant WiFi network without running cable and without suffering the usual double-NAT headaches that come from turning the router into yet another subnet. For this, the OnHub turned out to be nearly perfect.

The Hardware

The OnHub was Google’s first Wi-Fi router, built by TP-Link and ASUS in different versions. Mine was the TP-Link model, and one was missing a bit of plastic cowl trim. Under the hood, it has a Qualcomm IPQ8064 dual-core processor — a dual-core ARMv7 — multiple radios, gigabit Ethernet, and enough memory to run OpenWrt comfortably: 1 GB of RAM and 4 GB of flash. The processor also has two network offload processors, but it isn’t clear to me that the stock OpenWrt build uses them.

These devices were expensive when new, but now show up regularly at thrift stores and surplus sales. Installing OpenWrt was straightforward. You do need to remove a screw that covers the magic switch at the bottom, but that’s not a big problem. You can just peel the rubber foot back if you don’t want to remove it. However, the interesting part came afterward.

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